Week in Pictures

Visiting more local haunts in our Goodbye PDX Tour of sorts…awesome Cuban food at Pambiche…scored some great vinyl (Elvis, Pretenders, Beatles, etc.) at Vinyl Resting Place in St Johns, had our last Reuben at the Oregon Public House where Dan volunteered while waiting for his work authorization to come in, and noticing some more great street art, this time along Division…

Betty seems to prefer laying her egg mid-morning and in the bushes…this time, in the irises thinking she’s invisible…

Wow, our house is beginning to get empty…the breakfast nook where storage benches and a homemade table courtesy of my husband once lived? Empty. The table is now in the living room awaiting it’s transport and the storage benches have been completely disassembled as they won’t have a proper place in the farmhouse but the barn-salvage wood that it was made from? Super valuable…

After getting our keys several days earlier, this past Friday I headed out solo to the farmhouse to get a first look at things as we prep to bring U-Haul Truck #1 with our stuff out there. While Dan’s first days will be focused on building the duck coop/run and a new compost tumbler, mine will be to do what I affectionately refer to as, in this 1947 home, “de-1980’s” and “de-Westernize” it. Example in point? The breakfast nook off the kitchen has so much potential but aesthetically it’s pretty frightening. Let’s start with the articulating vinyl room divider. Why would you separate your nook from your kitchen and why with this awful thing? I don’t know. Or then there’s the base cabinets on one side of the nook artfully decorated with…cowboy boot stained glass and ‘country chic’ wood tones. Then to look up and see, yep, sponge-painted walls with giant stickers of horses. Giddy-up! Hmm. Yeah. And y’all can’t even see the two GARBAGE BAGS full of mauve and turquoise chiffon polyester curtains that I liberated from various brass and faux-copper curtain rods. WTF do home purchasing agreements require that you leave curtain rods and the like? Who the hell knows as the first thing I did was pull those down! So anyhoo, the room divider, curtains, rods, and about 25 country-chic (eek) switchplates around the house were all removed, bagged, and dumped off at TheRebuilding Center within minutes of getting back into Portland. And yeah, the cowboy boot cabinet fronts (along with all the other country-time 1980’s cabinet fronts in the kitchen and bathroom)? All moved into the garage (which, shockingly opposite of the house, has NO existing storage so we’re going to repurpose them as garage storage.

Yes, that’s a cannabis store with a pool and band in the parking lot across the street from Dan’s workplace. Only in PDX.

And today was Dan’s last day at his job here at New Seasons. I chatted with his manager and wonderful team in the deli where he is Mr. Charcuterie and got to hear the great announcement they made about Dan and all the well wishes, hugs, etc., not to mention the wonderful meat and cheese and beer gift they sent him off with. While he was sentimental about leaving the team after 3.5 years, the company itself has proven to be a total shitshow – from rampant discrimination to employment law violations to hiring Trump’s union-squashing firm to leaving local meat behind in favor of Tyson-owned “SmartChicken” to being run by an equity firm with a long history of supporting hate groups, this is not your Mama’s New Seasons…and we’re glad that era has passed. Nice folks in the deli but a whole lotta bullshit in other areas that made us stop shopping there long ago.

And with that? Time for new beginnings…time to be movin’ on, like Brandy said way back when…so here we go y’all…